SHfiguarts Kamen Rider Skull Crystal

Kamen Rider Skull Crystal is a basic form retroactively introduced in Movie Wars CORE.

Although the Movie War was titled “Kamen Rider x Kamen Rider OOO & W Feat Skull: Movie War CORE”, the main focus of the W segment is undeniably on Skull, who admittedly didn’t get much backstory revealed in Movie War 2010′s Begins Night or the W TV series. Prior to MWCore’s “Message for W”, pretty much all that was known about Skull was that he’s Akiko’s dad, Shotaro’s hardboiled mentor, fought Dopants as Skull and died saving Phillip from Museum. Thus, it’s great that ‘Message for W’ provided a more detailed origin story and characterisation for Skull (albeit via a very strange plot device known as the Memory Memory…)

In addition to a backstory, Toei gave Skull a basic form of sorts, somewhat like Kuuga’s Growing Form. Skull Crystal is essentially a weaker version of Skull, with a translucent head  and lacking Narumi’s white fedora. The form was unnecessary and not of much consequence to the movie, but Toei probably wanted to make a new form to milk, like what they did with Eternal’s Red Flare form.

Skull Crystal’s head is translucent, enabling you to see what’s inside it. It generally looks great from most angles, but it looks pretty strange from the side view, since there’s nothing behind the mouth at all.

A comparison of both heads. The Crystal head lacks the “S” crack on the forehead.

This release of Skull comes with 2 fedoras (1 intact, 1 with a tear), 2 scarves (1 hanging down, 1 flying in the wind), the 2 heads, a SkullMagnum, and 2 plastic caps for the hats. The plastic caps are a nice touch. As the fedoras are made of rubber, owners of the original Skull release had issues of the paint rubbing onto the head and vice versa.

The Skull and Crystal heads are entirely new sculpts, and are more proportionate to the rest of the body, compared to the original release which had a bigger head. In addition, Skull Crystal has a really great matte coating on his body, making him look more screen-accurate.

Nothing much to talk about with regards to his poseability, since he shares the standard W-series body type.

Unfortunately, there isn’t a hand that allows him to hold his hat really well.

To sum it up, Skull Crystal’s an excellent figure which far surpasses the predecessor.

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